Pivotal aims to level development playing field with new release

With the launch of enterprise oriented Pivotal One, company promises that everyone can now develop like an internet titan.

It’s been billed as a game changer for the mainstream
enterprise cloud – and, with the official launch of
Pivotal One, a new PaaS entry geared towards bringing
consumer-familiar cloud features to the enterprise, today, we’ll
finally get to see what all the buzz is about.

Consisting of set of application and data services layered
to run on top of enterprise distributionPivotal Cloud Foundry,
Pivotal One is the fruition of a
joint effortbetween VMware and EMC to develop a platform
equipped to address the demands of a big data driven modern
era.

Jaxenter caught up with Cloud Foundry Developer Advocate
Andy Piper, who told us that this release comes as a response to an
increasing movement among businesses to restructure traditional IT
departments into “agile software development” machines.

Pivotal is looking to enable what it refers to as, “the
consumer-grade enterprise” – allowing organisations to build out
services and applications more quickly, in the same way as the
fast-moving internet companies – “the ones that haven’t been
shackled by the weight of legacy environments.”

Piper tells us it wasn’t just a push for faster
development propelling Pivotal One though. They also wanted to
ensure that developers were able to store and analyse data from
their users and customers. Ultimately, Pivotal One “is about speed
and agility.”

In terms of the difference Pivotal One could make to
the everyday life of developers, Piper explains that the team is
hoping an end to the tedious laundry list of chores developers must
tackle to get an app deployed and running.

This includes everything from calling up
infrastructure teams, having new servers commissioned, and
operating systems installed, to configuring databases. He adds,
emphatically, that, “A development team shouldn’t have to go
through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app!”.

“When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry,
and can then bind data services and scale out with simple
individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared
to what traditionally has been required to get your application
running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a
friction-free, turnkey experience.”

As well as open source PaaS Cloud Foundry, the new
melting pot “platform” incorporates Spring technologies, Pivotal HD
(the company’s souped up Hadoop distribution, formed from Greenplum
parts), and analytics tool Cetas, which launched in February.

All of these additions will serve to simplify the process of
building big data services into their apps, and, Pivotal hopes,
“help usher in the era of
agile app development to the enterprise.”

Although other
PaaS service providers have made massive inroads in the sector,
Pivotal Senior Vice President and Cofounder Scott Yara believes
that deficiencies in existing services mean the field is wide open
for new challengers. He told Forbes that, “The industry hasn’t
given us something yet that is the complete answer…The answer
will be a company that allows for a much more open ecosystem to
win, and I think we are that answer.”